planting

First clear your land of stones and vegetation.

Plough it using a steel tipped plough. If you are lucky, you can get an Ox to pull it for you. Either way it means someone has to walk up and down that field until every foot of it is turned over. Miles for every acre.

Dig even deeper if you want to plant turnips, parsnips or small blue carrots.

Sow it with seed saved from last year, rye, oats, bere barley, emmer and spelt. Celtic beans, fat hen, root crops as above.

Keep the animals off it with fences, made from hazel witheys. Weed it. Pray for rain. Pray for sun. Cut it with sickles and stack the sheaves. Carry them down to the threshing area and thrash the grain and hang the green leaves that can't be eaten today. Dig out the pits in which to store the grain. Grind the daily flour.

Livestock

The cows in the picture at the top are modern day ones, larger and giving more milk than the short horn cattle, like highland cattle, they had then. Life would have been pretty hard without animals. Sheep for wool (plucked off their backs, or from the bushes they pushed past) and milk (and so, butter and cheese) and meat. Goats for milk and meat. Pigs for their meat, and blood, and skin. Chicken for eggs and feathers and meat. Dogs for hunting and guarding and showing off your wealth. Above all though, wealth was counted in cattle. Tasty and nutritious, with the added advantage of milk to drink and make cheese, hefty hides to cover shields and make aprons, or by softening the leather further by careful tanning, useful for shoes, and leather jerkins when smelting. But above all your neighbours, and your enemies could see the extent of your wealth as the cattle grazed, and envy you.

Most of these animals would be smaller than they are today, and less productive. Over thousands of years we have bred cows to produce more and more milk, more daily, and for more months after giving birth. They may not be as sturdy as the short horn cattle that were farmed then, but they have always needed la lot of care. When producing milk they need to drink a lot, which can mean moving from the best pasture down to the stream and back at least twice a day. Chalk valleys tend to be dry, so they would need herding to and fro, as well as being looked after so they didn't get ill, or damaged. They needed guarding against injury, and envious neighbours, as well as wolves and other predators. Small children would help keep an eye on them when they were out in the fields.